normal

Ah yes, I have a blog – still. And here I am writing something. Amazing.

Life for me lately has been pretty… normal. Seems like I’ve been saying that for a while now – too long. There are good things about normal, I suppose. Working, effectively, 3 jobs – working, working, working, being tired/bones hurting, eating, sleeping, repeat same – over and over and over and over again. You’re doing what you have to do – that’s good, right? We live in a world based on money and we don’t get electricity or water or anything for free. So we have to work, make money, and use that money to pay other people or companies for what we use. So you basically have to gear your entire life around what can get money in your bank account. Wait, I was talking about the good things, wasn’t I?

I hear people talk about taking these things called “vacations” – did I spell that correctly? I hear tell that folks go away for the weekend sometimes and pay money to people so they can sleep in rooms, pay more money to other people for food, admission to tours or museums and the like. Sometimes they just relax and don’t do anything… at places where they’ve paid money to do so. I’m not a participant.

Some human folks actually have regular sit-down dinners with their families on a nightly basis, or at least a weekly basis or something like that? What is THAT like? My children still all live at home. That’s fine with us. They are 22, 21, 18, and 16. I honestly don’t see them very often – none of them. No big heart-to-heart talks with wise old(er) Dad. No time for any of that. If that’s normal, I don’t like normal. I hate normal.

If this sounds like a sob story, it probably is. I’m not literally “sobbing,” but there is a kind of internal crying going on inside me nearly all the time. That’s about loss, or my perception of loss. Some of that is objectively accurate, some of it not entirely so, but based on reality. Loss, not only of things past and seemingly unrecoverable, but also of things in the future, seemingly now unattainable. It’s hard to describe what that feels like. Loss of hope is a horrible thing. Horrible. You have to use a word like “horrible” instead of just “bad” – bad doesn’t cut it.

Once I actually felt somewhat exceptional. I don’t mean in a prideful, I’m all that, sort of way. I just mean I felt I had a purpose, had been gifted by God in certain ways and that He was working in and through me toward certain ends. I don’t very often feel that way any more. I had great dreams and visions of things to come. I still have flashes, but mostly as if I’m a traveler in space who’s in a deep sleep chamber having flash dreams of something I once actually experienced or thought I would. I’m not really awake. I am lying here in this chamber. I am alive but my heart-beat is slowed to a bare minimum.

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Sounds dramatic doesn’t it? Well, it feels dramatic too, believe me. And please don’t say to me anything akin to, “just snap out of it man, that’s just life.” I might snap alright. If you’ve never gone through a period like this or felt anything like this, I’m glad for you. God can work good out of anything, but in the middle of these kinds of things, you can hardly see any good reason for it other than to destroy you.

Lest you think I’m just lying in a pile of dust and ashes and weeping all the time – well, I’m not. Life is OK. I’m fishing more than I have in a long time – that’s huge. The jobs that I do have are good. I don’t dislike them, and I’m grateful that I have them. I love my wife and my children. There are lots of good, regular, normal things. I’m just saying, and maybe you understand this, that normal just doesn’t quite feel right. There’s always something nooooot quite there. Not quite there.

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